Fifty years of waste siting postponement

Fifty years ago, when Enrico Fermi produced the first controlled nuclear chain reaction, he almost certainly realized he had created a material that could not be disposed of in ordinary ways. While records of radioactive waste disposal of the Curies, Becquerel, and others in the pre Stagg Field era are scattered, it appears likely that most of the waste material they produced was handled as ordinary garbage. There do not seem to be specific sites devoted to pre 1942 nuclear waste. This year marks five decades of attempts to solve the nuclear waste problem. By some measures, the solution is no closer than it was many years ago. If an attempt had been made in the late 1940s or 1950s, it would have been greeted with much less public outcry than today